A cool new PR tool I found

When browsing (as a user), I often use Pagerank to determine the "authority" level of the site. Maybe I'm brainwashed, but I put a lot of stock in the Pagerank number and trust Google to help me make decisions about what sites are good and which are bad.

But, there are quite a few insidious webmasters out there that fake their Pagerank through various methods. I found a tool that can let you know if a site's Pagerank is fake. Check out the Fake Pagerank tool at webmaster-rank.info. Although quite a bit of the text is in French, I've been able to use it without a problem. The author himself posted about the tool over at Digital Point, and says that it checks "Http header + fake Http header + false TLD detector + 3 level of cheating & fake redirection detector".

I'll be posting a list of some of my favorite webmaster tools in the upcoming days.

More on Google updates

I've been researching the subject quite a bit this week, and Google does other updates than the Pagerank update. I've found a cool little site that shows previous Google updates:

SEO Company

According to SEOCompany.com, it has been 117 days since the last pagerank update. The longest amount of time between updates has been 122 days. A lot of webmasters are crossing their fingers that the update is coming soon.

My advice? Focus on your search results - Focus on your search results - Focus on your search results! After all, a site with high pagerank is worthless if you don't have the results you need.

Google updates

Among the webmaster community, the Google PR update is waited for breathlessly. I don't stress it too much - my SERPs are more important. But, it's still a benchmark I like to have, especially if I have SEO clients who expect an update by a specific date.

Google has constraints that I can't even fathom, but a set update schedule would do wonders for some of the animosity they face from the webmaster crowd (we love the traffic, we hate the Goops we have to jump through).

So hey Google, update us already. :)